still no preview screen

[otkidd]

I am about to give up I have spent hours at this and still I am no where!!!I downloaded the newest version of TMPGEnc followed the wizard threw the setup and thought everything was great untill I got no preview screen. so I went to enviro. settings and went up on my direct show setting to 2 went threw the setup again and still no preview screen. So I downloaded nemo pack build 8 opened it up went threw the set up loaded it into program file. Opened up TMPGEnc went threw the setup again and still no preview screen. So I am getting pretty upset by now . I downloaded virtual dub the newest version 2.8 I think. I thought I would open it up in there and frameserve it to TMPGEnc. I am not sure I did this right I went to file clicked on it went to open video or file opened file went to save as avi and the input screen and out put screen both popped up and guess what NO ?#**#??!!! preview screen every thing is black so I went to video click on that and went to scan video or file and it said 0 frames bad 0 frames good can not encode video or avi "what ever" what am I missing or doing wrong I just want to know what I need to do to encode this ----video how do i know if i have the rfight codecs or if it is the avi or should i say the avi's cause i have tried this on more than 1 please help or I will bust up my new computer ha ha

[bugster]

The first question that has to be asked is will this (or these) avi's play in WMP. If not you are either missing a codec or it is a fake avi. You didn't get it off Kazaa or some other P2P prog did you, there are lots of fakes about at the moment.